A typical telephony subscriber installs a plurality of telephones in his or her household. For example, s/he may install telephones in various rooms of the household to enable easy reach of the telephone in the case s/he or other dwellers need to answer an incoming call or need to make an outgoing call irrespective of their location within the household. At the same time, these telephones are all associated with a single telephone number and a single telephone line that the subscriber subscribes to and pays for. In this scenario, if one user in the particular household is engaged in an active telephony session using one of the plurality of telephones installed in the household and, if a second incoming call is placed to the household telephone number, in the absence of any special telephony features provisioned in association with the household telephone number, the second incoming call can not be completed and the initiator of the second incoming call will likely get a busy signal or will be connected to a voice mail system.
One existing solution for managing the second incoming call is a feature commonly referred to as “call waiting”. Generally speaking, call waiting works in the following manner. If a calling party places a call to a called party which is otherwise engaged, and the called party has the call waiting feature enabled, the called party is able to suspend the current telephone call and switch to the new incoming call, and can then decide which of the two calls to continue with. The main drawback of the call waiting feature is that it only announces the second incoming call to the user who is currently engaged on the active telephony session and it is up to that user to determine how to dispose of the active communication session and the second incoming call.
There is a need in the art for a more flexible method for handling an incoming call, the incoming call destined for a particular telephone number, when an active communication session with the particular telephone number is in progress.